Self-Assembling Photovoltaic Tech From MIT

telomerewhythere writes "Michael Strano and his team at MIT have made a self-assembling and indefinitely repairable photovoltaic cell based on the principle found in chloroplasts inside plant cells. 'The system Strano's team produced is made up of seven different compounds, including the carbon nanotubes, the phospholipids, and the proteins that make up the reaction centers, which under the right conditions spontaneously assemble themselves into a light-harvesting structure that produces an electric current. Strano says he believes this sets a record for the complexity of a self-assembling system. When a surfactant is added to the mix, the seven components all come apart and form a soupy solution. Then, when the researchers removed the surfactant, the compounds spontaneously assembled once again into a perfectly formed, rejuvenated photocell.'"

Comments

Re:Concidentally..

[martin-boundary]

This is /., you have to say "Infringe the copyright of some nanos for my female instance".

FAIL. She's not his female instance, she's a derived class.

real source

[Anonymous Coward]

is at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/self-healing-solar.html

Re:This is incredible news

[IndustrialComplex]

No but many are more evolved then us. Plants have been around evolving on land much longer then the first bug left the oceans. They are quite adapted to their environment. Now humans and mammals are not so evolved but our evolutionary path took a different way where a more organized central nervice system took presendance over energy gathering.

That's not quite the best description of evolution. It isn't a race to some endpoint, there really isn't much that can be classified as 'less evolved or more evolved' unless you slice the requirements so thin that only one organism could survive based on such criteria and therefore make the whole concept of evolution meaningless. Let's say a landslide washes a very niche species of plant into the ocean where the saline content promptly kills the entire species. Does that make a salmon more evolved since it didn't die?

And for that matter, unless we assume some multiple genesis theory for life on Earth, every species today has been subject to evolutionary forces for the exact length of time as any other species.